[The Practical Nomad Newsletter] Amazing Race 15, Episode 2

Tue Oct 6 17:58:55 PDT 2009

In Vietnam, lessons in crossing the street and recycling. See below, or 
with links (including some fascinating "shipbreaking"  recycling videos):

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001743.html

=====

Did you get an e-mail message from Southwest Aiurlines or American 
Airlines this week about adding your date of birth to your reservations 
and your frequent flyer profile? It's about "Secure Flight", and here's  
what it really means:

FAQ about "Secure Flight"
http://www.papersplease.org/sf_faq.html

More FAQ's about "Secure Flight":
http://www.papersplease.org/wp/2009/08/16/secure-flight-frequently-asked-
questions/

Meanwhile, the FBI wants even more travel records:
http://www.papersplease.org/wp/2009/09/28/fbi-wants-records-from-travel-
data-aggregators/

Ask for your own travel dossier, while you still can:
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001607.html

=====

*The Amazing Race 15, Episode 2*

Cai Be (Vietnam) - My Tho (Vietnam) - Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)

Once again this week "The Amazing Race" managed to come up with tasks that 
were genuinely characteristic of the places the racers were visiting on 
their trip around the world, in this case Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. One 
task required the racers to learn a skill that local people take for 
granted, but that new visitors find unexpectedly difficult: crossing the 
street. The other major task was one that tourists don't usually have to 
tackle, but that provides an eye-opening lesson: breaking down discarded 
electronic devices for recycling.

*Crossing the street*

Think you know how to cross the street, the way your mother taught you? If 
you're used to streets where most of the traffic consists of four-wheeled 
and larger vehicles, which stops intermittently on signal to allow 
pedestrians to cross at intersections, think again. At first glance, it's 
less than obvious what to do in a place like Vietnam where:

* Almost all the of the vehicles are two-wheeled (or occasionally three-
wheeled rickshaws), mostly motorbikes and bicycles in a mix varying 
depending on the wealth of the city or town (overwhelmingly motorbikes in 
Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, but with a higher proportion of bicycles in 
poorer areas in the provinces); and

* The traffic is essentially continuous, with traffic circles at many 
intersections, few marked crosswalks, and limited observance of traffic 
signals.

Basically, imagine a city with three or four million Boston drivers (or 
worse) on highly maneuverable motorized dirt bikes that can, and do, drive 
everywhere including on the sidewalks. How do you cross a street with 
traffic like this?

It helps to be a Bostonian, of course. I remember how amazed I was, at age 
20-something,when I realized while travelling in Seattle that there are 
places where "jaywalking" is a crime, not just a descriptive term for 
"crossing the street in mid-block". But there's more to it than this. The 
key realization is that you have to cross through the flow of two-wheeled 
traffic, rather than waiting for a break in traffic. And since on most 
Vietnamese city streets there is never a "break" long enough to get 
entirely across the street, it's pointless to wait for such a gap, and 
counterproductive and dangerous to hurry across the road.

Unlike wide four-wheeled vehicles, which are trapped in lanes and can't 
avoid a pedestrian in the middle of their path, individual two-wheelers 
are narrow and have enough horizontal maneuvering room, even in densely 
packed traffic, to enable them to go around an obstacle the size of a 
person in the road, if they see the person ahead and can anticipate where 
they will be. So the key steps in crossing the street in Vietnam are:

1. Before you step off the curb, make eye contact with the next 
approaching (motor)cyclist closest to the edge of the road, and make sure 
s/he sees you and has room to avoid you.

2. Once you are out in the river of traffic, keep moving at a steady pace 
so that approaching drivers can predict your position and steer around 
you. No matter how frightening you find it to have motorcycles whizzing 
past simultaneously inches in front of you and behind you, resist any 
temptation to change speed suddenly. Either bolting forward or stopping 
short is almost certain to get you run down.

Easier said than done, especially at first, and the racers were given no 
clue about how to cross the street (or even that it would be difficult or 
required a different technique than back home in the USA) when they were 
assigned a task that required maneuvering cargo on carts along a route 
that crossed a busy street. Some of them were shown holding up traffic on 
the entire street for their partners. More or less the equivalent in L.A. 
terms of stopping traffic in all lanes of Wilshire Boulevard rather than 
waiting for a pedestrian signal. They are lucky that in general Vietnamese 
people are so generous and tolerant towards foreign guests. 

*Recycling*

The combination of material poverty (a legacy of French colonialism and 
the American War) and near-universal literacy (a legacy of Communism and, 
sadly, declining along with it) and a more educated mass workforce than 
many other countries makes Vietnam one of the world capitals of recycling. 
Everything no longer wanted is re-sold or collected for re-use, even 
"night soil". As I wrote in "The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the 
World":

"Northerners may have something to teach Southerners about technology, but 
we also have a great deal to learn. The world's most skilled mechanics 
aren't the Northerners who can afford to throw something away and buy 
another if it's "too much trouble" to repair it. Southerners are -- by 
necessity -- the world champions of ingenuity, improvisation, repair, 
rebuilding, scrounging, adapting, and making-do. These are all alternative 
names for recycling. Forced to make a long journey in an unreliable, 
randomly chosen old vehicle, with few tools or spare parts, I would 
unhesitatingly choose a team of Vietnamese or other Third or Fourth World 
mechanics as most likely to get me where I wanted to go."

But eventually some things can no longer be repaired or re-used for their 
original purpose. Then its time to .. did I hear you say, "Throw them 
away"? Are you crazy? Who could afford to do that? (Answer: People in the 
USA, not in Vietnam.) It's time to take or send them to someone who can 
recover as many valuable materials as possible from them for re-use in 
making other new things. And where is this place, "away", of which you 
speak? Often, the world's "away", where it sends its refuse, is a place 
like Vietnam, especially when breakdown and recovery of component 
materials is labor-intensive and/or dangerous.

Ships, for example, are run aground on beaches in Bangladesh, Pakistan, 
and India where men with handheld cutting torches reduce them to pieces 
small enough to be carried by gangs of laborers and trucked to smelters 
where they are melted down for new steel, like an army of ants nibbling on 
the body of a beached whale, while a secondary army of scavengers picks 
over their fittings and components.

Televisions, computer computer, and other CRT's -- perhaps a hundred 
million of them a year, at the current peak of the transition to flat-
panel displays -- are sent to China and, yes, Vietnam, where the tubes are 
smashed open to remove the wire coils and other components (and 
incidentally but inevitably, release the mercury, lead, and other poisons 
within the tubes) before the glass and other components are smelted for re-
use.

The racers were given a slightly different (and much less toxic) task, 
breaking apart irreparably damaged or defective VCR's to separate the 
plastic, ferrous metal, copper, circuit boards, etc. for reprocessing.

The real difficulty, of course, isn't in smashing a few old VCR's -- most 
of the racers seem to find a bit of atavistic pleasure in it -- but in 
imagining 
what it's like to that job all day, every day, for a working lifetime. At 
times 
like these, I'm reminded that my greatest privilege as one of the the 
world's economic and political elite, a citizen of the USA, isn't just 
that I get to travel. It's that I get to come home to a place so far 
removed from these consequences of my lifestyle.

----------------
Edward Hasbrouck
<edward at hasbrouck.org>
<http://hasbrouck.org>
+1-415-824-0214

"The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World"
(4th edition 2007)
"The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace"
<http://www.practicalnomad.com>

Around-the-World and multi-stop international air tickets:
<http://hasbrouck.org/tickets/>